Even some toddlers these days are overscheduled, overstressed, and overwhelmed. Over it? Here's how you can help your kids recapture the simple pleasures of play.

Scanning the list of after-school activities on a local parenting Website, my heart races a little: What will I do with my boys this year? Swimming ... Spanish immersion ... musical theater ... hmm, how about rock climbing? Given that Gus has inherited my clumsiness, that class might as well be titled "Learning How to Plummet to Your Death." So maybe not. But all my kids' friends — and all my friends' kids — will be learning, seeing, doing. What are my kids going to do, sit around the house and rot like logs?

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Henry and Gus are 6. Here's the truth: It's not that tough to amuse a 6-year-old. To my sons, a trip to the butcher's with Mom is still a fine way to while away the time. (Dead things! Guys speaking Italian! Knives!) Yet I always feel a little panicky about whether that's enough. Don't they need more challenge, more stimulation, more variety — just more? So there are the chess lessons, the soccer clinics, the photography classes.... What, I wonder, will they be missing if they come home from first grade and do what I did as a little kid: nothing?

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That's my first thought. My second is, What the hell has happened to me?

What's happened, it seems, is that I've drunk the Kool-Aid of modern American parenting. The thinking goes like this: The sooner our children start racking up knowledge and experiences — whether it's learning Mandarin or perfecting their sidestroke — the greater their lifelong chances for happiness and success. (Plus, there's this dirty little secret: A lot of parenting is, not to put too fine a point on it, boring. Which would you rather do: watch your child play in dirt or cheer her on as she learns how to sing "Tomorrow" and make jazz hands at a Broadway Babies class?) Failing to fill your child's life with stimulating organized activities is seen as — well, if not child abuse, at least a form of neglect, because a child's self-worth is directly related to his or her ability to master stuff. The more stuff, the better. Right?

"Well, what kind of mastery are we talking about?" asks Susan Linn, a psychologist at the Judge Baker Children's Center and Harvard Medical School and the author of The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World. "Children learn through playing, through active exploration that feeds their imagination, not by always having others organize the world for them."

Wait. Children learn by hanging out with friends and just playing? Playing? What could a 2-year-old possibly be learning by crawling in and out of a large box, as mine used to do (often ignoring the present that was in the box)? Apparently, a lot. Because that box could be a rocket, or a pirate ship — who knows? Some experts go even further in defense of plain-old play, asserting that too much structured time and too many complicated toys actually impede development.

Hard to believe? Well, maybe that's because many adults have a kind of amnesia about what was important to us growing up. We (and by "we," I mean I) tend to think, Well, it's a tougher world than the one we grew up in, and our kids must learn to compete on the reality show called, um, Reality. So we see unstructured play as a waste of time.

In praise of play

We're missing the point, experts say. "A baby who drops a toy repeatedly out of her crib may be annoying, but she's actually learning about gravity," explains David Elkind, Ph.D., whose recent book, The Power of Play, examines the critical role of unstructured playtime in kids' lives. Play, writes Nancy Carlsson-Paige, in her new book, Taking Back Childhood, "is a powerful vehicle through which [kids] can make sense of their experience, master difficult life events, and build new ideas."

I thought about this idea the other day when a 3-year-old girl came over to our house and began playing with one of my son's plastic sharks. She was making the shark eat plastic insects and fake fish — then spit them out. Then she would make the shark "sleep" on its back. She did this over and over, then finally walked over to her mom and said, "The shark isn't sleeping. The shark died."

"Her grandmother just died," the mom whispered to me. "And before she died, Grandma couldn't eat anything. I guess it's on her mind."

Relentlessly provide your child with homework and structured activities, experts say, and you will be teaching him what to think. Leave plenty of room for self-directed play and unstructured time, and you will be teaching him how to think. "It's in playing that we first learn to think for ourselves, and perhaps only in playing that we can truly be ourselves," says Linn.

Yet parents increasingly can't — or won't — see those benefits. According to research from the University of Michigan on how children ages 3 to 12 spend their time, over the past 20 years there has been a drop of 12 hours a week of free time overall, with unstructured activities like walking or camping falling by 50 percent — and structured sports going up by 50 percent. "I'm amazed by the parents around here that have their kids scheduled all the time," says Julie Bell-Voorhees, a mother of four in Sneads Ferry, NC. "Pick them up at 10, drop them off at 10:30, pick them up again at 2, drop them at another event. It's like we feel we have to have our children's lives mapped out by the time they're 10. Like, 'My kid will play piano, play golf, and speak French.' Where's the fun in that?"

The hyper-parenting hype

This tendency of parents to organize their children's lives like Admiral Ramsay plotting the invasion of Normandy is a phenomenon that Alvin Rosenfeld, M.D., the former head of the child psychiatry training program at Stanford University in California and author of The Overscheduled Child, calls hyper-parenting. It's a form of "child-rearing madness," Rosenfeld says, with no proven scientific advantages. Even the central tenet of hyper-parenting — the idea that parents ought to accelerate children's performance at everything from reading to swinging a bat — may be incorrect: Some of the world's most prominent talents have emerged at a very human pace from decidedly average or even troubled beginnings. "Leonard Bernstein started playing the piano at 10," notes Rosenfeld. "And until George Gershwin discovered music, he specialized, apparently with considerable success, in being a child hoodlum." And Michael Jordan, one of the great athletes of all time? "At first, he didn't make his high school's J.V. basketball team."

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Of course, there are some children who really do thrive on being supercharged and superbusy. But for every kid who enjoys keeping lots of balls in the air, there are probably 10 who suffer in the process. All work and no play makes Jack not just a dull boy but, in the long run, a less happy and productive one, too. In the leisure time kids manage to squeeze out between appointments, they're often engaged in electronic media — computers, television. Which may be sometimes educational and entertaining, but they are not play; in fact, according to Linn, they are usually "antithetical to play." Play is about discovering what the world is for yourself; most computer games and television shows are presenting you with a world invented by a programmer, where you are either a passive spectator or a character defined and limited by rules that other people have engineered. There is speed, noise, action, distraction. But to develop into a creative being in this noisy, fast-paced, electronics-filled world, Linn insists, children need "time, space, and silence."

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How can you let your kid just be a kid?

There's a good chance that your child is, right now, making his own Harry Potter broomstick out of a stick he found in the backyard ... and he might prefer it to the pricey vibrating plastic version you were thinking of buying him. Childhood experts and those who have studied the stressed-out are weighing in on the ways we can help our children reclaim simpler pleasures. Here are a few of their suggestions for slowing down and getting a little balance back into kids' lives:

Embrace the joy of goofing around.
If you live in an area where you can let your child run amok with his friends outdoors, let him; if you don't, remember that just hanging with friends and neighbors indoors can be great too. I've recently adopted an open-door policy with the parents and kids in my building: The result sometimes necessitates that I wear earplugs and swill wine on a Saturday afternoon when the hordes descend, but the chaos and occasional showdowns ("You cheated!" "Did not!" — ah, the dulcet tones of 6-year-old boys) are far preferable to the eerie silence that descends when little kids are locked for hours in the world of Noggin or Club Penguin.

Limit kids to one or two activities per season.

For her book The Overachievers, which chronicled the lives of hyper-competitive teens destined for prestigious colleges, Alexandra Robbins interviewed kids of all ages; she found some as young as 6 who complained of stress, and 8-year-olds who were carrying day planners. "Kids may have lots of energy, but they get as tense as adults would when they're overscheduled," Robbins says.

Some parents I know are taking the less-is-more idea a step further, at least temporarily. "One semester we took the girls out of everything," says Soledad O'Brien, an anchor and special correspondent for CNN and mother of four children under 8. With all the various activities of the older girls, "it was getting insane ... and it was hurricane season for me, so I was traveling more than usual. I said, 'Screw it,' and took 'em out of all extracurriculars." O'Brien then substituted dates with her daughters: Once a week Mom picked up one girl, who got to do whatever she wanted — museum, bookstore, carriage ride in Central Park, lunch in the CNN cafeteria (a favorite). "One-on-one time is great, especially with four kids," says O'Brien. "And a child walking down the street telling complete strangers, 'I'm on a date with my mom!' is really sweet."

Eat dinner together.

Forget homework and extracurriculars; if you really want your children to thrive, break bread with them. "For young children, mealtime at home is a stronger predictor of academic achievement and psychological adjustment than time spent in school, studying, sports, church/religious activities, or art activities," says William J. Doherty, Ph.D., a professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota and author of The Intentional Family. And for older kids? Family dinner is not only a strong predictor of academic success; it is also correlated with lower rates of alcohol and drug use, early sexual behavior, and suicide risk.

Encourage more human time, less screen and toy time.

Our children are spending larger and larger chunks of time with stuff and less time with people. "Think about it," says Elkind. "Even with something as simple as a car ride ... parents used to use car time to talk to their kids, and now the kids are watching DVDs in the backseat." Elkind also notes that the reason classic toys like Etch A Sketch, Mr. Potato Head, and Play-Doh are still popular is that they don't direct a child's play; they don't say, "Here's the story. Play with me like this." Instead, these simpler toys allow for more wide-ranging, creative experience. "A good toy is 90 percent child and only 10 percent toy," notes Linn.

Introduce computers with caution.

Many childhood experts agree that the interactive quality of computers can be powerfully motivating for kids who are learning to read and write — and games can be just plain pleasurable, too. But, notes Elkind, computers are finding their ways into tinier and tinier hands. "There are these little computers and computer games for 6-month-olds now," he says. "Parents who say, 'Well, computers are part of our world' are right. But to them I say: 'Microwaves are part of our world too, and you wouldn't stick one in the crib of a 6-month-old.'"

Reclaim summer.

The first week of summer, I took my son Henry up to a lake outside the city and assumed he'd do exactly what I'd done at his age: hunt around for frogs, stare at the dragonflies. Instead, I got "Boorring"; he couldn't wait to get back home to open his lemonade stand and make some bucks. Now, this kid has been Alex P. Keaton since the moment he heard the words Commerce Bank; still, I was appalled that he had so little concept of the pleasures of a lazy summer day. Maybe taking him on a tour of the New York Stock Exchange a few days earlier instead of going to a friend's swimming pool hadn't been such a hot idea.

And maybe it's time for all of us to stop thinking of summer vacation as an opportunity to burnish a résumé. Children and parents need that hiatus to recharge. As a bonus, if you relax over the summer, you're going to be rejuvenated in time for back-to-school. Says Julie Bell-Voorhees, "When else are your kids going to catch lightning bugs and learn to play games like Jailbreak with the neighborhood kids?"

Be outnumbered.
Jill Davidson, an education writer in Providence, RI, is by nature a planner and a scheduler. But she discovered that the secret to giving her family more unscheduled time was ... having a bigger family. She recently had a third son, and now "I don't have as much time, energy, or money to drag them around," she says. "I'm with the baby, Leo plays with his trucks in the yard, Elias — the future Bob Costas — does endless baseball replays outside and works on his stats, and they both go and play with the neighbors. Since the baby came along, I am paying a little less attention to them. And you know what? They're fine. Better than fine — I think they're happier."

Of course, many of us can't or don't want to have more than one or two children. But there are lots of ways to give your kids more time with other kids (like my open-door policy) and less with you. Don't confuse loving with hovering.

Learn to trust your child.
This may be the most important parenting rule of all, says Elkind. "Children are self-directed learners — they are naturally curious — and how they learn is through play." When Henry finally stopped hyperventilating about getting back to the city for his lemonade stand, he teamed up with another kid at the lake who taught him how to skip rocks. This being Henry, the rock skipping ended in some massive contest over who could find the flattest rock and skip it the most times ... and at some point, betting was involved. But in this simple, time-honored pursuit, they were learning something about the natural world, something about the physics of water and stone, and something about companionship and cooperation. At least I think they were. And heck, even if they weren't, I didn't have to listen to my 6-year-old discuss gross versus net for an hour. Now that's a blessing of play.

As for me, well, this much I know: After a year of enrolling my sons in after-school programs to keep them busy, busy, busy, I'll be doing things differently in the fall. Sure, on a couple of days they will be out and about. And I admit it's sometimes tempting to schedule them away every day: Ah, the peace in my house until they show up at 6:30!

But recently I talked about a new after-school program with Henry, and he was quiet for a moment. First he asked if I would be playing with him. "No," I explained, "you'll be playing with other kids." Then he wanted to know if the program could be done at our house. "No," I said, "it's near school."

"Mama," he said to me finally, "that day is too long. And I am too short."

Freeze tag is starting to get frozen out of the school yard: Forty percent of American schools have either eliminated a daily recess period or are considering doing away with it, according to a survey of 15,000 elementary school districts by the American Association for the Child's Right to Play.

"With more schools needing to post test scores in newspapers, principals and administrators are searching wildly to find additional time to prepare kids for those tests," says Rhonda Clements, Ed.D., an education professor at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY, who conducted the survey. The irony is that making kids sit in class is probably the least effective way to raise test scores, says Clements. "You want to keep children alert and attentive to task," she explains. "It's impossible to do this if a child is sitting at a desk all day. We call exercise 'nourishing a sluggish brain.' "

Exercise is also a key antidote to the widespread problem of childhood obesity. And not only does recess help children's waistlines, Clements adds, but it also teaches them important life skills such as decision making and problem solving.

After surveying 26,000 PTA presidents nationwide, the PTA found that most parents want recess for their kids, says James Martinez, a national PTA spokesperson. "We're optimistic that schools will start turning this around," he adds. The National PTA and Cartoon Network have joined forces to make sure recess doesn't disappear. In 2006, the two groups launched Rescuing Recess, a program aimed at preserving the exercise break. To learn more, visit pta.org.